Turns out she's been close enough, as far as the Post is concerned, to really know what she's talking about. As the AP reports, Book World apologizes, at Irving's prompting, for assigning the review to Wiggins without knowing that "Irving had dedicated one of his earlier novels to [her] ex-husband, Salman Rushdie," or that "Irving and Wiggins had socialized with each other in the past." Personally, I think the detail of the dedication is a bit of misdirection--A Son of the Circus came out years after Rushdie and Wiggins divorced, which makes me suspect that it's been at least twelve years since Irving "socialized" with Wiggins.

BEATRIX homeBEATRIX archivesAbout RON HOGAN Ron Hogan is a freelance writer who reviews books and interviews writers for publications such as Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of an illustrated overview of American films from the 1970s called The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, due out from Bulfinch Press in November 2005. About BEATRIX How did this season's hot books generate their heat? And why do other novels surrounded by buzz turn into duds? Beatrix, a subset of my longrunning literary blog Beatrice.com, openly speculated about these questions in the form of "book review reviews" from January to August of 2005. Beatrice; or, Where It All Began I first launched Beatrice.com in 1995 as a venue for author interviews. In late 2003, I switched over to a daily blog of news and commentary about books and authors. What you see here now is essentially one side of that blog's original makeup, the side that dealt with how books were received by the literary culture. The full blog contains not only these "book review reviews," but news items about various writers and original insights from the authors themselves in the form of interviews, blog excerpts, and guest articles.

I'll Show You Mine One of my regular gigs is as a freelance reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Although some people have a problem with anonymous reviews in PW, I'm all for them in general principle (though I think embargoes are a crock, but that's a different story)...anyway, I'd like to give any reveiwers who might be reading this the same opportunity to critique me, so I'll look into whether it's kosher for me to pull back the curtain. And I'll try to land some assignments with bylines, too. (In fact, if you're reading this, and you can assign book reviews...)

MAJOR BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS

Registration Required? Some of the newspapers and magazines below require readers to submit personal data before offering up access to their content. If you'd rather not hand over your personal information, try the username "ajreader" (or, if they want an email, add "@artsjournal.com") and the password "access" or "access1." If that doesn't work, the website BugMeNot can provide you with other dummy registrations to most publications with such policies.